One man's dream, they say, is another man's nightmare.
But in the case of Craig Dremann, a retired "ecological restorationist," the dream of saving the habitat of the greater sage-grouse could become a horror story for land users in the 11 Western states where the bird lives and for Americans elsewhere who eat the food grown there or heat their homes with energy produced from the area's natural gas deposits.
Dremann is a sincere, thoughtful advocate of environmental stewardship, who does not believe his vision for sagebrush country conflicts with the long-term interests of other users of this land. Yet, his potential success in using the Endangered Species Act (ESA) demonstrates there is something terribly wrong with this law.
For three decades, Dremann ran a business specializing in restoring native vegetation to degraded lands. He also taught land restoration to federal employees.
The inspiration to save the grouse came to him after a long drive seven years ago.
"In 1997, when I was doing some classes for the Forest Service in South Dakota and Colorado, I drove across the Great Basin in a big, giant 'X,'" he said. "I went from Reno to South Dakota and then from Idaho to Bishop, Calif. Since I didn't have anything else to do while I was driving, I did what they call a 'mega-transect.' What that means is every mile, when the odometer would click over another mile, I would take a note of what the surrounding vegetation looked like, what the quality was."
Dremann likens what he saw to a tire worn down until the steel is showing. "They have got to get a new set of tires on that ecosytem," he says. And he likens the sage-grouse to "the gas gauge on the car." It indicates, he argues, that "the ecosystem is getting close to empty."
In 1973, Congress had created the instrument Dremann needed to carry out his vision for gassing up and putting new tires on sagebrush country. It was ESA.
The act empowers any American to petition the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to list a species as threatened or endangered. If a creature is listed, activities deemed harmful to its "critical habitat" are curtailed.
In June 2002, using a Bureau of Land Management report on the sage-grouse as his back up, Dremann sent a seven-page petition to the Fish adn Wildlife Service asking that the bird be protected across its entire range -- covering land from California to North Dakota, from Idaho down through Utah. This cost him, he says, "a couple of bucks" in postage.
In March and December 2003, 22 environmental groups filed two additional petitions asking FWS to list the grouse.